A bird's eye view of our planet's nooks and crannies

A bird's eye view of our planet's nooks and crannies

Scientists love drones. They provide a bird’s-eye view of our planet’s nooks and crannies at a resolution that satellites can’t match and at a price even they can afford.

Take the doughty scientists who count royal penguins at Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean. Each summer when the penguins arrived to breed, researchers had to pull on boots, brave the ferocious weather and count them.

Jarrod Hodgson, a drone expert at the University of Adelaide, helped them out by mounting a powerful SLR camera on a fixed-wing “FX79” drone flown at 125 metres above the ground. The drone isn’t just quicker; it’s an order of magnitude more precise than ground-based counts.

Credit: Monash University / Jarrod Hodgson

Revealing bettongs

Feral cats and foxes nearly wiped out bettongs on the Australian mainland. They’ve been reintroduced to South Australia within a fenced zone called the Arid Recovery Reserve at Roxby Downs. But are they thriving? Hard to say – the desert-dwelling marsupials hide out all day in burrows.

Send in the drones. Hodgson and his colleagues at the University of Adelaide’s Unmanned Research Aircraft Facility (URAF) are testing whether drones can provide a surrogate measure for bettong numbers. Using drone snapshots, they measure the number of entrances to the burrows (the heavily shadowed holes in the ground visible) as well as the general soil disturbance around the site.

Credit: URAF.org / University of Adelaide

Colour-coded wheat

It’s tough growing wheat in salty soil. In this field trial, drones are helping scientists evaluate which varieties do best.

... Now they can take a virtual stroll through a forest, thanks to the University of Adelaide’s URAF team. A drone flies a grid-like path across the landscape and software stitches together the still shots to create a 3D model.

Hodgson and his colleagues are empowering researchers to use drones by running training courses. This image, of a dry forest on Grand Terre island, New Caledonia, was “planned and executed entirely by course participants – demonstrating the accessibility of low-cost UAV technology”.